Customs' corruption tough to root out

Dan Freedman, EXAMINER WASHINGTON BUREAU

Published 4:00 am, Monday, October 14, 1996

1996-10-14 04:00:00 PDT MEXICO; UNITED STATES -- WASHINGTON - When veteran U.S. Customs agent William Green took the reins of the service's internal affairs office, his mandate was to stop the growing corruption along the Southwestern U.S. border.

He came up with what seemed to him like a common-sense solution: Transfer locally hired Customs inspectors and supervisors to other border outposts as a way of breaking up their entrenched family and social ties to possible drug traffickers.

Rotating law enforcement officers is a textbook move for police administrators. But within the Customs hierarchy in the Southwest, Green's 1988 proposal evoked a firestorm of condemnation. Ultimately it went down in flames. In 1990, his moral and political ammunition spent, Green was ushered out the door into a new assignment.

Green was not alone in his efforts to thwart internal corruption in the Customs Service. Other Customs agents have put corruption in the cross hairs only to find they were firing blanks.

John Juhasz organized an inter-agency task force in Arizona in 1990 to pursue allegations against Customs and Justice Department employees in that state's parched border region.

The following year he was yanked from the position and told by superiors he could work anywhere the Customs Service operated besides Arizona. "Who sold us out?" Juhasz posed in a May 5, 1991, letter to then-Customs Commissioner Carol Hallett.

Unwilling to face corruption

To the cynical among Customs' 19,000 employees, what happened to Green and Juhasz is emblematic of a government agency unable - or simply unwilling - to come to grips with corruption in its ranks.

"Corruption has never been high on the list of necessities," said one senior Customs official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "The mind-set is to go after the person complaining, as opposed to the issue. Anybody who comes on too strong is discredited."

At the federal level, Customs, a Treasury Department agency, shares the border drug-detection responsibility with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, a Justice Department unit. The INS, which includes the Border Patrol, has its own corruption problem along the Southwest border.

But the two agencies deal with the problem in different ways. Since 1989, the INS internal policing has been vested in a separate agency - the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General, with a force of 118 special agents.

By contrast, Customs internal affairs, with over 300 agents, reports up the chain to the same commissioner who oversees the employees under investigation - an organizational chart riddled with conflict-of-interest potential.

"Customs has taken a kinder, gentler attitude toward criminal activity on the border in the past few years, and that malaise has affected internal affairs," said William von Raab, Customs commissioner during the Reagan administration.

Internal probes blasted

U.S. Customs Commissioner George Weise said steps have been taken to professionalize internal affairs and make sure its probes are tightly focused and not open-ended. Nevertheless, he acknowledged there is some validity to the perception that internal affairs has been populated by what Weise termed "cast offs" from Customs' force of regular special agents.

Some of the strongest criticism of Customs internal affairs comes from the service's own senior managers. In an internal memo dated July 1, 1994, Customs official Deborah Spero wrote that the Customs internal affairs office is "purely reactive right now; there is no real analytical work going on; within Customs, we have built no resident expertise on corruption."

Customs, "with few exceptions," initiates cases after receiving allegations, rather than going out and pro-actively detecting corrupt officers," wrote Spero, who now serves as assistant commissioner in charge of human resources.

Inspecting border traffic is arduous work in the best of times. In places like El Paso, Texas; Douglas, Ariz.; and Calexico, Imperial County, summer daytime temperatures average above 100 degrees. The work is routine, monotonous and unhealthy - inspectors breathe in high levels of carbon monoxide.

Managerial disarray magnifies the natural difficulties of the job and represents a potential breeding ground for corruption.

El Paso, for instance, has been afflicted with staff shortages that have turned the job of policing border traffic into a nightmare. Particularly in the past two years, many inspectors have worked staggering back-to-back double shifts, sometimes as much as five and six days a week before exceeding overtime limits, according to Charles Giunta, the National Treasury Employees Union chapter president.

Too much work for inspectors

In July, a Customs labor-management fact-finding task force concluded that Customs in El Paso is doing too much work with too few inspectors. "Additional resources are needed immediately," an executive summary of the task force's draft report said.

However, Giunta said managers belatedly are compensating for months of neglect.

In 1992, a House Government Operations subcommittee under the chairmanship of then-Rep. Doug Barnard, D-Ga., plumbed the depths of Customs border operations in three days of hearings.

In a Nov. 18, 1992, letter to the Clinton transition team, Barnard and Rep. Charlie Rose, D-N.C., warned of

"serious mismanagement and misconduct within the Customs Service." Had Barnard's ill health not short-circuited the investigation, the subcommittee would have called for an independent counsel or special prosecutor to probe Customs, the lawmakers said.

A "blue ribbon" panel appointed in 1991 by then-Customs Commissioner Hallett concluded there had been a

"breakdown of the management structure (of Customs) in the Southwest region," according to Frank Keating, the panel's chairman. Keating now is governor of Oklahoma.

Customs' refusal to rotate

Keating told the House subcommittee that Customs conducted "inadequate" background checks of prospective border employees, and that Customs' refusal to rotate personnel was "an open invitation" to corruption.

Weise said the obstacles to rotation included Customs' agreement with the National Treasury Employees Union and the sheer expense of shuffling so many employees around - $90 million or more to move 1,800 inspectors once.

But rotation of law enforcement officers has long been a key element of the anti-corruption gospel preached by police experts.

"You have to be realistic about the fact that someone will know people in the area where they're from and will be subjected to temptation," said Patrick Murphy, New York City's police commissioner between 1970 and 1973 who now directs the police policy board of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. And such enticements "would not exist if they were transferred." &lt;